Ten years ago Mahan Esfahani was by his own account a nerdy anorak at Stanford University, obsessively tutoring himself with the aid of old records in the hope of realizing what seemed an impossible dream – to make his living on that Cinderella of keyboard instruments, the harpsichord.

A few months ago, now thirty, he carried off the award for Gramophone magazine’s Baroque instrumental album of the year, and the Guildhall School has appointed him professor of harpsichord. Not bad from a standing start, and for a total outsider. But perhaps – in addition to exceptional talent, and sheer slog – that outsiderness is the key.

When he was four, he and his parents left Tehran to join the Iranian expatriate community in America, where making good financially was the imperative. Mahan started playing the piano at six and developed an obsession with Bach from the moment he was first given the score of a two-part invention. “The counterpoint sounded so exotic as to be almost Chinese, and so logical” – he dashes over to my piano to demonstrate – “that I knew I was going to spend a lot of time with music like that. Something clicked for me.”

But his parents wanted him to be a doctor, and at Stanford he started a pre-med course, only to realize after two lectures that it wasn’t for him. Law was their next idea – “as I like talking” – but he gravitated instead to the organs and harpischords of the music faculty and began to immerse himself in scores, contemporary accounts of Baroque music-making and the recordings of his heroes, with the great harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick, who had been virtually self-taught, prominent among them.

His next eureka moment came when he heard a recording by that sacred monster of harpsichordism, Wanda Landowska: “And I realized why the Bach I had been playing and hearing had never sounded quite right. I now know that she wasn’t particularly ‘authentic,’ but to me she got the spirit of Bach, and I think he would have nodded in approval if he’d heard her play. What I like about her is [that she doesn’t] let a set of prescribed rules for performance practice dictate what [she’ll] do with the music.” This is said with a pugilistic fire to which we will return.

Without a harpsichord of his own, and with no agent or sponsor, he knocked about playing to anyone who would listen until 2008, when an invitation came out of the blue to join up as a BBC New Generation Artist. “They’d been quietly watching me. They said it need not entail much, and I wouldn’t have to live in London; I’d just do a couple of projects per year. I replied that I didn’t actually have a career, I didn’t have any concerts planned, and I had no income, so why didn’t I just come to Britain? And I presented them with a long list of projects I could do. I came here to live, and one thing led to another.” One of the perks of the scheme was a Wigmore recital which got him his first-ever reviews (one of them by me). “That was my first properly paid concert – when I got the check from the Wigmore I’d never seen that much money, £1,800! I thought – wow – I could really make this work.”

But he’s not averse, when necessary, to biting the hand that feeds him, and the BBC’s obsession with presenting the musicians of the past as being “just like us” makes him bristle with scorn. “That’s really dumb – people in the past were very different. If you ever found your grandmother’s habits strange, how could you seriously imagine that you could understand people who lived three centuries ago? We laugh when we hear recordings from eighty years ago, so how can we possibly claim to know how music was played in the much more distant past?”

More ire is directed at the early-music industry. Disdaining the conventional keyboardist’s tight-arsed silence – “This isn’t a gun club, it’s music!” – he talks to his audience, illuminatingly and amusingly, between the pieces he performs: he may be a serious musicologist, but he wears his learning lightly.

Get him on prevailing attitudes to his instrument, and he really takes off, becoming very exercised about critics who, while praising his recordings, add the ritual rider that his playing “transcends the harpsichord’s limitations.” “If someone comes up to me on Twitter and says they hate the harpsichord, I always offer them a free ticket, saying come and see what you think. And nobody has ever said afterwards that they didn’t like it. They say ‘I didn’t know that it could sing like that’. But of course it can, it’s an incredibly vocal instrument. Its sound is clear and precise, and has a great deal of color.” And the spurious contest between harpsichord and Steinway should emphatically not, he argues, be seen in terms of decibels. “That shirt you are wearing is not a ‘loud’ shirt, but it has a lot of colors in it, it’s loud in a different way. The harpsichord enables you to hear much more subtlety, and it has a sensual quality. If any pianist wants to slam it” – and one prominent pianist routinely does – “be ready to have a public discussion with me, and have a piano and a harpsichord ready on stage.” Any takers?

This engaging contrarian is full of future plans, including a Scarlatti splurge, new commissions for his instrument, and – something really original – commissioning a keyboard that will allow Persian tuning. He leads a dedicated life, practicing most of the day and reading fiction by the great Russian masters plus his favorite American novelist, Philip Roth. ‘“An American Jew, he speaks to me as an Iranian – the irony, the overbearing mother, the guilt complex.” How Iranian does Esfahani feel? The answer comes out like machine-gun fire: “I’m sentimental, quick to judge, and quick to apologize; I’m a loyal friend; I like good food; and I hang on every word from my mother. Yes, I’m very Iranian.”

And his ultimate ambition? “To record on the harpsichord every keyboard piece Bach wrote. I reckon it will take me twenty years.” That’s him sorted, then.

She’s hot in Cleveland – and even hotter on the concert podium. The television actress Valerie Bertinelli, 52, even as she continues to film her successful TV Land sitcom Hot in Cleveland (recently picked up for a fifth season), has been deepening her acquaintance with some of the most challenging repertory of the classical literature – as a conductor.

On 1 April 2013, the label CD Land (a TV Land affiliate) announced that it has signed Bertinelli to an exclusive recording contract (the news was leaked on Facebook slightly in advance of the announcement). Her first release will be Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244), to be recorded later this year at an undisclosed location in New Jersey, and scheduled for release in 2014.

Casting has yet to be revealed, but there is behind-the-scenes speculation that the crossover-style performance will incorporate a solo role for the rocker Eddie van Halen, Bertinelli’s ex-husband and, she says, an abiding musical inspiration. Bertinelli will lead the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in an all-new arrangement of Bach’s score prepared by the composer John Williams, with the harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani acting as stylistic advisor to ensure the integrity of the project. In a special cameo, Bertinelli’s fellow-Hot in Cleveland cast member Betty White will sing the famous aria Erbarme dich.

“With this approach,” Bertinelli said in a statement, “I feel we will be able to present Bach’s music in an entirely new light.”

Bertinelli’s commitment to classical music has remained largely secret from her American fans. In Europe, however, the actress has been gaining attention for striking interpretations of some repertory staples, showing a stylistic breadth that stands in marked contrast to much of her acting career. “One of the most gripping readings of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony that I personally know,” enthused one well-placed insider who commented on the condition of anonymity between him and more than two thousand Facebook “friends.” From soap opera to real opera: “Her Parsifal,” a Wagnerian remarks, “is second to none.”

Bertinelli came to conducting through a Czech reality show that was a precursor to the later BBC series Maestro, in which minor celebrities learn the nuts and bolts of conducting at the hands of a panel of professional musicians. Although she failed to make the top three – the victor was the tennis player Ivan Lendl – Bertinelli discovered a thereto-undreamed-of passion for classical music that led her to pursue studies at the Prague Conservatory in the late 1990s, a period during which her acting career seemed largely dormant. As a protege of the late Bohumil Gregor, she developed her expertise as a Janáček interpreter.

That she chose to remain silent about her increasingly consuming passion for music in her various volumes of memoirs, including her recent cookbook One Dish at a Time, was, she now says, partly an act of self-protection, although in fact music played an even more significant role than Jenny Craig in her stunning weight losses over the years. (“Boulez’s Pli selon pli,” the actress says, “is the ultimate workout tape.”) The decision to go public was not made lightly – nor was the decision to present herself as a crossover artist. According to sources, Bertinelli’s originally hoped to record Janáček’s The Excursions of Mr. Brouček to the Moon and to the Fifteenth Century, but label executives wanted to find music that might appeal to Bertinelli’s existing audience.

Bertinelli says her interpretation of the St. Matthew Passion was influenced by her experiences playing an angel on the CBS drama Touched by an Angel, which she now says helped her identify with the religious content of Bach’s masterwork.

No announcement has yet been made about Bertinelli’s second recording, but it will likely focus on female composers. In a 2010 interview with the Czech Music Quarterly, the actress mentioned her recent discovery in the Los Angeles Public Library of a forgotten orchestral song cycle by Cécile Chaminade from the early 1930s, written for MGM and thought to have been lost when the studio discarded its musical archives in the 1960; its rejection so scarred Chaminade that she largely abandoned composition in the last years of her life. It is entitled Poisson d’avril.